Lighting the Entrepreneurial Fire in the Third World

For Mary Wanango, the bean lady in the Paidha town market (two
colorful acres of intense open-air sales action every Wednesday morning),
the impact of a $15 loan has been enormous.

Mary, dressed in a cotton rainbow, is all business about beans.
Her initial $15, provided by the woman's business coop at St. Peters
Anglican Church in Paidha, turned her into an international trader.

"I now cross the border to the Congo town of Kudikoka," she told
me through a translator. "Because I have capital, the loan, I can now buy
several kilos, 20 kilos in bulk, cheaper than I buy in Uganda."

Her business has boomed. "My customers here in Paidha buy more
at a lower price. I have repaid the first loan and sought another." Her
import cost at border customs, if the Congolese and Ugandan border cops
don't pump for a bribe? "1500 Uganda shillings."

Exchange rates and local economics, however, only begin to
suggest the potential economic impact of small but highly directed loans, or
in some cases, small-scale aid programs.

St. Peters Church in Paidha -- the town only appears on a
detailed map -- is directly engaged in the hottest concept in international
development and aid: micro-development.

From Bangladesh to Thailand, think small and do small has cachet
among governmental and non-governmental aid and development advocates. The
best programs, however, really don't "think small," they think large in a
different way. They seek to encourage and promote the productive dynamism of
human will and creativity empowered by experience, education and ethics.

I spent two weeks in Kenya and Uganda examining several
micro-development and aid programs. Micro-development attracted me a decade
ago as a means of slipping capital into developing nations beneath what I
dubbed "the corruption horizon." Corruption savages economic development --
ask investors in Global Crossing and Enron. Small, targeted programs are
less likely to attract big thieves with Swiss bank accounts.

Since 1950, international agencies have spent a cool trillion in
U.S. dollars on anti-poverty and economic programs in developing nations,
with much of it wasted or pilfered. In too many cases, "spending large" has
not produced large, or medium, or even small results. Big dams and bad debt
aren't the crucial development issues -- they are building human economic
expertise and thwarting corruption.

East Africa has a growing number of people who are doing
precisely that. The majority of the programs I saw support their small-scale
finance activity with business advice, economic education and ethical
counsel. The goals: building the economically savvy "human infrastructure"
and civil society that undergird liberal capitalism.

That isn't thinking small, it's thinking long -- then proceeding
to build the human spine of 21st century economies.

In Kenya, I visited Nairobi slums and outlying towns with
Faulu-Kenya, a non-sectarian micro-finance corporation dedicated to building
people who can build an economy. We spent one morning in Thika, where
Faulu-Kenya is advising a church organization on how local leaders can
create, fund and operate a "village development bank" in a grass-roots
effort to fight unemployment.

One Kenyan businessman told me: "There are many in our national
government who support these efforts fully. But doing for yourself, for
ourselves -- with good advice and models, of course -- this empowers the
people for building a stronger, expanding national economy."

Bishop Henry Orombi, of the Anglican diocese of Nebbi in Uganda,
where Paidha is located, has set up 52 women's economic cooperatives.
Through two lending cycles, only two groups defaulted on loans. "These
programs are a means for people in developing nations to move from aid, a
receiving mentality, to doing," Orombi said.

Hope isn't a method. These programs are the slow but genuine
road to a better future.